The present invention is directed toward an advertising panel for a conveyor and more particularly, toward an advertising panel that requires no modification to an existing conveyor base plates and which allows the advertising copy to be easily and quickly changed.
Conveyors for carrying items from one location to another location are well-known in the art. These conveyors are often configured as endless, essentially circular dispensing apparatus and are frequently used, for example, for transporting baggage at airports. Such conveyors are often called carousels because the baggage is placed onto plates or panels of the conveyor from a centrally located distributing point making the baggage available to the passengers around the periphery of the apparatus at a remote location.
Two general types of carousel conveyor apparatus are known and in wide use. The first utilizes rectangularly shaped plates while the other employs crescent shaped plates. Conveyors using rectangular plates are generally oval in shape with the rectangular panels overlapping and sloping downward toward the peripheral outer edge of the conveyor. The crescent panels are generally used on flat conveyors with an oval or a serpentine configuration.
Frequently, advertisements are placed on the center nonmoving section of the carousel. These advertisements are often used to promote local business or to advertise car rental companies or different airlines. The advertising area is extremely limited since the people to whom the advertising is directed generally congregate in a limited number of specific positions around the carousel to retrieve their baggage. As a result, the audience sees only a small section of the total advertising that could be placed on the nonrotating section of the carousel.
In order to increase advertising space, advertisements can be placed directly on the moving conveyor plates. These plates provide a much larger advertising space. As a result, the advertisements can be viewed by everyone no mater where they may be assembled along the length of the conveyor.
Carousel advertisements are typically affixed to the conveyor plates either by an adhesive or using screws to pass through an overlying transparent sheet and into the conveyor plate. The use of screws in conventional systems requires modification to the conveyor plates in order to accept the same. On the other hand, the use of adhesives to affix the advertisements makes subsequent removal difficult and renders the advertisement difficult or impossible to reuse.
Systems have been proposed to improve the manner in which advertising may be carried by a carousel conveyor. U.S. Pat. No. 5,311,980, issued to Munkner et al., for example, discloses printing advertisements on sheets of polyethylene, or similar material, and affixing them directly to the conveyor plates by way of a pressure sensitive adhesive. One of the main disadvantages of such sheets, however, is their poor durability. Baggage carried on the conveyor tends to scratch and tear the sheet material. In addition, removal of sheet material from conveyor plates is time-consuming requiring either peeling off the sticker and removing the adhesive left behind or replacing the entire plate with a new panel with a new advertisement sheet. The same problem occurs when it is simply desired to change the advertisement even if the advertising sheet is not damaged.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,526 to Conklin Jr. discloses a conveyor system with conveyor panels that are constructed from transparent material. Each transparent conveyor panel has a viewable section and an overlapping section. An advertising sheet is affixed onto the underside of the viewable section of the transparent conveyor panel with an adhesive applied to the top surface of the advertising sheet. Conklin Jr. also discloses the use of ink that is hot stamped directly onto the transparent panels. As in the case of conveyor panels with decals for advertising material, advertising sheets glued to the transparent conveyor panels are difficult to remove limiting the reuse of these panels. Consequently, the entire panel must be removed from the conveyor belt and replaced with a new panel containing a new advertising sheet. Such a system is expensive and time-consuming. Obviously, when the advertising message is hot stamped directly onto the transparent panels, the transparent panel cannot be reused and must be replaced with a new panel having a new hot stamped message.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,280,831 to Conklin Jr. discloses a system for use with conveyors that includes a specially designed base belt plate instead of a conventional conveyor plate. The base plate includes a recess defined by spacers extending from at least two edges of the plate. An advertising sheet is affixed to the underside of a transparent cover with an adhesive and is then affixed by way of screws to the surface of the base plate within the recess. This method of changing advertising sheets is labor intensive. Similar arrangements are shown in Conklin, Jr.'s U.S. Pat. No. 6,186,314 and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,044,961. These arrangements, however, include means for holding the transparent cover in place without the use of screws or pins within the advertising field.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,849,918 to Mazzocco, Sr. there is disclosed a continuous display device with display panels having a permanent portion and a removable portion. The permanent portion consists of an inner sheet of translucent or transparent plastic material. The removable portion consists of a pair of outer sheets of transparent material that form a pocket into which is inserted an advertising display sheet.
Other relevant systems can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,979,591 to Habegger et al and U.S. Pat. No. 5,358,094 to Molinaro et al. The former discloses a conveyor belt with advertising indicia on a visible surface. A film of transparent plastic covers the visible surface to protect the advertising indicia. The later patent discloses a conveyor belt of the type to be used at checkout counters with advertisements that adhere to the conveyor belt through electrostatic attraction. Even further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,244,080 to Bierbaum discloses an information bearing belt conveyor with two layers. The top viewable layer has windows for receiving inserts with outlines of letters or figures. The shapes of the windows are complementary to the inserts.
All of the foregoing and other advertising systems for conveyors suffer from numerous disadvantages. In some cases, it is extremely difficult, time consuming and expensive to replace part or all of the advertising when necessary or desired. Other systems that make it easy to replace the advertising require extensive or expensive modifications to the conveyor system. There is, therefore, a need for an inexpensive advertising system that will stand up to abuse, that can be applied to conventional conveyor systems without modifying them and which allows for the quick and inexpensive changing of advertising copy.